5 Best WordPress Firewall Plugins Compared

Are you looking for the best WordPress firewall plugin for your website? WordPress firewall plugins protect your website against hacking, brute force and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. In this article, we will compare the best WordPress firewall plugins, and how they stack up against each other.

What is a WordPress Firewall Plugin?

A WordPress firewall plugin (also known as web application firewall or WAF), acts as a shield between your website and all incoming traffic. These web application firewalls monitor your website traffic and blocks many common security threats before they reach your WordPress site.

Application Level Firewall – These firewall plugins examine the traffic once it reaches your server but before loading most WordPress scripts. This method is not as efficient as DNS level firewall in reducing the server load.

We recommend using a DNS level firewall because they are exceptionally good at identifying genuine website traffic vs bad requests.

They do that by tracking thousands of websites, comparing trends, looking for botnets, known bad IPs, and blocking traffic to pages that your users would normally never request.

Not to mention, DNS level website firewalls significantly reduce the load on your WordPress hosting server which makes sure that your website does not go down.

Having said that, let’s take a look at the best WordPress firewall plugins that you can use to protect your website.

Cloudflare is best known for their free CDN service which includes basic DDoS protection as well. However, their free plan doesn’t include website application firewall. For WAF you will need to signup for their Pro plan.

Cloudflare is also a DNS level firewall which means your traffic goes through their network. This improves performance of your website and reduces downtime in case of unusually high traffic.

The Pro plan only includes DDoS protection against layer 3 attacks. For protection against advanced DDoS layer 5 and 7 attacks, you will need at least their business plan.

Cloudflare has its pros, which include CDN, caching, and a larger network of servers. The downside is that they do not offer application level security scans, malware protection, blacklist removal, security notifications and alerts. They also do not monitor your WordPress site for file changes and other common WordPress security threats.

SiteLock’s WAF is a DNS level firewall with a CDN service included in all plans to improve performance of your website. They offer daily malware scans, file change monitoring, security alerts, and malware removal.

All plans include basic DDoS protection while advanced DDoS protection is available as an add-on. They also allow customers to display SiteLock trust seal on their websites.

They have also partnered with many hosting companies to offer their basic plan as an addon. If you start your WordPress blog with Bluehost then you will be shown SiteLock as an addon that you can add to your hosting package.

However, it is unclear what’s included in that addon, and how it is different than the plans offered on SiteLock’s official website.

Wordfence is a popular WordPress security plugin with a built-in website application firewall. It monitors your WordPress site for malware, file changes, SQL injections, and more. It also protects your website against DDoS and brute force attacks.

Wordfence is an application level firewall which means that firewall is triggered on your server and bad traffic is blocked after it reaches your server but before loading your website.

This is not the most efficient way to block attacks. Large number of bad requests will still increase load on your server. Because it’s an application level firewall, WordPress does not come with a content delivery network (CDN).

Wordfence comes with on-demand security scans as well as scheduled scans. It also allows you to manually monitor traffic and block suspicious looking IPs directly from your WordPress admin area.

BulletProof security is another popular WordPress security plugin. It comes with a built-in application level firewall, login security, database backup, maintenance mode, and several security tweaks to protect your website.

BulletProof security does not offer a very good user experience and many beginners may have difficulty understanding what to do. It does come with a setup wizard that automatically updates your WordPress .htaccess files and enables firewall protection.

It does not have a file scanner to check for malicious code on your website. The paid version of the plugin offers extra features to monitor for intrusion and malicious files in your WordPress uploads folder.

Conclusion

After careful comparison of all these popular WordPress firewall plugins, we believe that Sucuri is undoubtedly the best firewall protection you can get for your WordPress site.

It is the best DNS level firewall with the most comprehensive security features to give you complete peace of mind. On top of that, the performance boost that you get from their CDN is very impressive.

Great article, but I could I ask you to do this again from a global perspective. What you have written I can see for example is US or Europe focused.

Let me explain our issue, we are with Sucuri, which they are great but, as an Australian company the nearest Sucuri WAF is Japan or West Coast US. So that means all traffic has to go from Australia (where most our visitors are) to Japan or the US then back to Australia and we are averaging 1.5 second times for this.

Your blog post didnt take into account anywhere the server locations of any of the services. Do you think you could redo factoring in the WAF locations?

Hi,
Hopefully you can assist me. I downloaded Image Mapper in hope to be able to map a graphic in WordPress. Sadly to say after mapping our the image with 8 links, it didn’t work. So, i asking if there is a good mapping program which will work well with WordPress.

I currently use Cloudflare Pro and Wordfence Pro in combination and have great success keeping my sites safe. I have used SiteLock in the past (in fact have 3 sites under contract for another month). SiteLock’s customer service wasn’t great at all. One sales rep kept trying to upsell me on the firewall because of our SSL but never sent cost proposals after many requests. Nor did he explain why the firewall needed to be updated after selling us the first one. The firewall seems ok, but not without minor flaws. I also didn’t notice any speed increase at all with SiteLock.

I have had the same problems with SiteLock in the upselling each time I had to contact them. SiteLock did not run well with my server. It has been a headache. I also had to pay for SSL Comondo separate. I will now try Scuri for $300 a year. YIKES! Hope it works for me.

How about including and comparing few free WP firewall plugins? Many small bloggers don’t have the budget to pay monthly or annually for this software. Also there are many free options that do an excellent job protecting WP sites.

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